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00:00Music
00:09These are revolutionary times for maps.
00:15They're being transformed by 21st century technology.
00:21In the past it could take hundreds of years to make a map.
00:25Now photoreal digital images can be made in hours and updated every week to create a virtual world of maps.
00:35They seem to present a completely accurate objective image of the world,
00:39the triumphant culmination of thousands of years of map making.
00:46But from the Christian vision of the Middle Ages,
00:49to the elaborate symbolism of the Aztecs,
00:53and from the Victorian obsession with statistics,
00:57to Nazi propaganda,
01:01history reveals that maps are shaped by the beliefs, rituals and prejudices of the people who make them.
01:09Maps have always done more than just accurately represent the world,
01:12and that's what really excites me about them.
01:14They are unique windows onto past ages,
01:17full of passions and anxieties of the people that made them.
01:21And if we scratch beneath their surface,
01:23we begin to understand how different cultures, different societies,
01:27have used those maps to define their faith,
01:29to understand their environment,
01:31to impose order and structure on their teeming chaotic worlds.
01:36The 9th of October, 1943.
01:54Allied bombers above Hanover destroy much of the city, including the State Archives.
02:00In the basement was one of the world's most precious medieval treasures,
02:06the Ebbsdorf map.
02:10The Nazis had just ordered its removal to safety,
02:13but it was too late.
02:15This rare insight into the medieval mind was lost in the rubble.
02:22The Ebbsdorf map was made at the end of the 13th century by the nuns of Ebbsdorf Abbey in northern Germany.
02:41Most medieval maps in Europe were made by religious orders.
02:46They were the intellectual elite,
02:48and they also had the resources to create these wonderful works of art.
02:56Fortunately, the nuns had photographs of the original Ebbsdorf map,
03:00so after the war they were able to make a magnificent copy of their lost treasure.
03:04Wow.
03:11I have been looking at reproductions in books of this map for years,
03:17but to actually see it here, what, ten foot tall, is absolutely breathtaking.
03:23It's a spectacular map.
03:28It's not really a map as we understand it in modern terms.
03:33It's a kind of vast encyclopedia of everything that was known to 13th century Europeans.
03:40It's totally unrecognizable to us as we look at it now,
03:44but if you start to dig a bit deeper, it starts to make some kind of sense.
03:49This is a map of three continents.
03:52Asia sits at the top, that entire top half of the map.
03:56Africa is right over here, running right down from here.
04:01There is Africa right down the coast.
04:04And tucked in here, in the bottom left-hand corner, is Europa.
04:09There's Anglia, England, down here.
04:12But this is also a map of what is unknown to the 13th century mind.
04:19Looking again at the edges of the map, you start to see these rather monstrous figures.
04:25Gog and Magog, these two fearful creatures, cannibals, monstrous figures, eating human flesh.
04:33Also on the margins, the massagets, children who eat their parents.
04:40And if you go back over to this side, into Africa, again, the limits of the map, more monstrous races.
04:47Starts with animals, so griffin-like figures, snakes, strange half-human, half-animal creatures here.
04:57Figures with no eyes, with no heads, creatures with no arms.
05:03And it becomes more and more monstrous as you run up the African coast.
05:11But there are also more familiar local features on the map.
05:14Northern Germany is shown with its rivers and its towns.
05:17And the Ebbsdorf Abbey is clearly marked too.
05:20The map comes from and was created here in Ebbsdorf.
05:26And it belongs here.
05:28It's ours, and it's something we're very proud of.
05:32What are your favorite images on the map?
05:35I particularly love the representation of paradise, right next to the head of Jesus Christ.
05:41It is an enchanting depiction.
05:44Adam and Eve have both got an apple.
05:48That is a sign for equal rights.
05:51And a snake winds down.
05:54The snake is fantastic, because it's not a feminine snake, but a masculine one with a beard.
06:05In the 13th century, the majority of people were illiterate.
06:09They had to rely on pictures.
06:11I think our map used to be of great importance to communicate to people.
06:16And to confirm ideas.
06:22The Ebbsdorf map is a magnificent display of knowledge.
06:25It was used by the nuns as a spiritual guide to present the Christian vision of the world.
06:32This is clearly not about geography in the modern sense of the term.
06:36This is a map about faith.
06:38And if you look at the center of the map, all its locations are biblical ones.
06:43You can see Galilee here.
06:46You have Bethlehem with its little star there.
06:50You can see Noah's Ark up here, something there.
06:55You can see the Tower of Babel rising up there.
06:58It's telling a very specific story about the Christian faith and its forms of belief.
07:05And right at the center of the map is Jerusalem.
07:09It's at the absolute heart of the map.
07:12And within its walled city, an image of the resurrected Christ.
07:16This is an image that puts Christianity right at the heart of the entire known world.
07:27But there's also a hidden message lying at the heart of this map.
07:30The viewer is being asked to think beyond earthly delight and think about heaven.
07:35Think about the next world that they're heading to.
07:38And you can see this in the whole sweep of the map.
07:42At the top, the head of Christ.
07:45To the right and the left, his hands.
07:48And at the bottom, his little feet poking out.
07:53This is a world defined by Christ.
07:56Christ is the world.
07:57And he's embracing it in a big theological bear hug.
08:10While the Ebbsdorf nuns were celebrating Christ's protective embrace of the world,
08:15Benedictine monks in England were using a much more detailed religious map
08:19to find their way to heaven.
08:23It was made 700 years ago by one of the most important historians in England,
08:27and the country.
08:30A Benedictine monk called Matthew Paris.
08:33And it looks much more like a map to be used on the road.
08:44These beautiful pages are a pilgrim's guide.
08:48They show a route map all the way from England to the holy city of Jerusalem.
08:53It starts down here with London.
08:55Depicted very precisely the city walls.
08:59You can even see some poles.
09:01Then the roads go outwards, down towards the channel.
09:05Jump on board a ship.
09:07Get to France.
09:13Off you go.
09:15Down through Paris.
09:16Passing important religious shrines, powerful abbeys as you go.
09:21The space between each town represented here is one day's ride.
09:26So you know exactly how far you're travelling.
09:28And you go down through Italy.
09:41Passing, there's Rome.
09:43And then you jump on board another boat.
09:45Go via Sicily.
09:46So there's a lovely little insert there.
09:49The flap.
09:51Off you go through the eastern Mediterranean.
09:54Hit the Holy Land.
09:56And your ultimate sacred destination of Jerusalem.
10:00There it is.
10:02But there's something very puzzling about this route map.
10:04Because the monks in Albans who were using it weren't going anywhere at all.
10:17Pilgrimage wasn't really on the cards for monks.
10:21Because their way of living was based on a particular place.
10:25And moving on elaborate journeys was not really part of their normal life.
10:34And if they had gone to Jerusalem, they may have been a bit disillusioned when they saw the reality of it.
10:40Because in their minds, Jerusalem was somewhere really special.
10:43For the monks of medieval Britain, the place of Christ's death and resurrection was tantalizingly out of reach.
11:00How do you think that the monks might have used the maps?
11:03They could have used them as part of their personal spiritual pilgrimage.
11:07A monk's life is a pilgrimage which is centred on the cloister.
11:12Not on movement from one holy place to another.
11:16So this map from England right to Jerusalem is a spiritual journey.
11:21It's not a physical journey.
11:22But that actually becomes more powerful in a sense.
11:25The fact that that's what it's about.
11:27I would say that because I think medieval maps are about faith, knowledge.
11:34What's the resonance for you when you look at this?
11:36Well, the personal resonance is a wonderful sense of place.
11:42And I think that fits in very much with the Benedictine idea of stability.
11:47Because stability is about being rooted in a particular place.
11:51And there finding God, but also finding oneself.
11:56And I think you can see Matthew Paris in these maps trying to find God,
12:01but also finding himself en route.
12:06Matthew Paris was making these maps to take Benedictine monks on a personal journey.
12:11The aim was to save the soul through meditation and prayer.
12:14Medieval Christian maps weren't really about defining territory.
12:25They weren't really even interested in getting from A to B.
12:29Their interest was getting people to focus on a higher spiritual realm.
12:33On rising up above the earth and reaching up to heaven.
12:36200 years later, the ancient Aztecs were also using maps to convey information about their own rituals and beliefs.
12:58They give us a rare insight into one of the great empires of Central America.
13:09One of their maps is part of a book called the Codex Mendoza, which describes Aztec life and rituals.
13:15It was created by an Aztec artist in the 1540s.
13:20At first sight, it doesn't look like a map at all.
13:25To westernize, this image is almost completely alien.
13:29But that's because the Aztecs had a very different conception of space to us.
13:33This is, in fact, a city map.
13:37It shows the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, on the current site of Mexico City.
13:44The city was built on a vast swamp.
13:47And you can see the canals which run in this big blue X right through its center.
13:53And also up here, you can see the main temple to the gods.
13:57But down here, there's also a rather chilling reminder of the Aztecs' obsession with blood sacrifice.
14:04This is a skull rack.
14:05And sure enough, there is the skull of a defeated enemy.
14:13The map is full of symbolic information about Aztec society.
14:19The eagle sitting on a cactus on the rock is a reference to the city's foundation myth.
14:24It was said that the gods had sent the eagle to mark the spot where the Aztecs were to build their capital.
14:31It remains the national symbol of Mexico.
14:38Beneath the eagle is a shield with seven feathers and a bundle of spears,
14:43which symbolize the authority of the Aztec lords.
14:46And beneath the city are triumphal images of two Aztec military victories.
14:54But by the time this map was made, the Aztec empire had been conquered and colonized by the Spanish.
15:03The map was commissioned by the Spanish governor, Antonio Mendoza, as a gift for the king of Spain.
15:11Aztec artists were employed to create the map to show off the king's new territories and subjects.
15:16So what were the native artists trying to tell him?
15:29The key to understanding this map lies in these male figures all across the city.
15:36And what they represent is its rulers, its elders.
15:38And this incredibly important figure down here is the priest ruler.
15:43You can tell it's him because he's larger than everybody else.
15:46He's also painted in black body paint.
15:49But surrounding him are these other male figures who represent the rulers of particular zones or neighborhoods of the city.
15:57Because this is a map about hierarchy. It's about a deeply structured society which wants to map its city around these kind of issues rather than where the canals run or how the streets cut across the city.
16:12Because that's the nature of Aztec society. Top down, deeply structured, utterly hierarchical.
16:17The native artists who drew this map were making a record of the glories of the old Aztec empire.
16:26It's a defiant celebration of its power structures, its rituals and its beliefs.
16:34The map is a record of a mighty empire conquered by the Spaniards.
16:39But it's also a really poignant image of everything that the Aztecs had lost.
16:44While the Aztecs were drawing symbolic images commemorating their own lost empire, Europeans were making ever more accurate maps to help them understand their newly conquered territories.
17:02And maps were starting to look more like the ones we use to navigate the world today.
17:07But even as they became more accurate, they were still revealing the beliefs and prejudices of the age.
17:22The British were increasingly curious about the inhabitants of Britain's far-flung dominions.
17:28And in the 19th century, maps were a popular source of information.
17:31Some of London's most fashionable maps were made by a prolific cartographer called James Wilde.
17:45Wilde specialised in world atlases.
17:48And in 1815, he made this elaborate map, which he called a chart of the world, showing the religion, population and civilisation of each country.
17:57It was an ambitious attempt to catalogue all the available statistics about the population of the world.
18:04Wilde even used a colour code to show the dominant religions in each part of the world.
18:19Protestantism was green, Catholicism was red, Jews were black, atheism was brown, and idolatry was a rather sickly yellow.
18:36In the key to Wilde's map, he describes all the different religious denominations, Christians, Muslims.
18:41And then he gets into some rather wonderful descriptions of idolatry, which he says is absence, feigned or sincere, of religion, which is apparently 153 million people.
18:56He also has atheism, which he describes as a state of absolute ignorance.
19:01And there are apparently 30 million people who subscribe to that belief.
19:04And you can see this being reproduced across the surface of the map.
19:09And down here in the South Seas, you get lovely descriptions of Fijians, cannibals.
19:17Down in New Zealand, cannibals. Cannibals.
19:22More cannibals. And yet more cannibals.
19:24In the Atlantic Ocean, a tribe called the Jagas, and their chief worship consists in frequent sacrifices of human victims, particularly children.
19:38Wilde's map was made at a time when Britain's imperial forces were spreading through India, Sri Lanka and Southern Africa.
19:44He used his map to satisfy his readers' curiosity and confirm their worst fears about these unfamiliar native peoples.
19:57There's even a scale to show how civilized each nation is, which is in Roman numerals, from one to five.
20:04One is absolutely uncivilized, and five is very civilized.
20:08No surprise, England gets top marks, gets a five.
20:12So does France.
20:14But you look across the rest of the map, and sadly the Hare Indians up in Canada only score a miserable one, as do the Copper Indians.
20:23And so sadly do the cannibals down in the South Seas, only coming in with a miserable one.
20:28Wilde's map was an attempt to reassure his readers that Britain and the British were at the pinnacle of civilization.
20:41It's really an expression of British fears, prejudices, but also anxieties about how to govern non-Christian alien peoples that were now coming into the sway of the Empire.
20:56In 19th century Britain, the drive to gather statistics about the rapidly rising population at home was also gathering pace and efficiency.
21:14And maps were becoming powerful tools that could be used to identify social problems and even save lives.
21:27In 1831, a mapmaker came to the rescue when thousands of people across the country suddenly started dying of a mysterious disease.
21:38Maybe you'd wake up and there would be 10% of your neighbors would be dead.
21:45And that would be horrific when you didn't have any idea what was going on.
21:49And it meant that a lot of people would just move, would just pack up their stuff and leave to try and get away from this very, very quick death.
21:56Very, very quick death.
22:03Victims writhed in agony, their muscles continuously spasming.
22:08Once infected, they could die within hours.
22:11Nobody knew what was causing the spread of the disease or how it could be stopped.
22:15Once the outbreak had ended, over 32,000 people had lost their lives.
22:20And they called it the Blue Death.
22:23It was Britain's first cholera epidemic.
22:28As it swept across the country, an apprentice surgeon called John Snow was struggling to save the lives of infected patients.
22:38Snow felt helpless as he watched victim after victim die.
22:43But he was already beginning to develop an idea about what was causing the deadly disease.
22:49The scientists at the time were baffled.
22:53Most of them thought that the disease was spread by a miasma of infected air.
22:58But John Snow believed that it was caused by tiny microorganisms invisible to the eye.
23:03And he suspected that the sewers were contaminating the drinking water and spreading the disease.
23:08When another cholera epidemic hit Britain, Snow examined water samples from the drinking supply of a cluster of victims in south London.
23:18He found they were all contaminated by raw sewage.
23:23This was the breakthrough.
23:26In 1849, he published an outline of his theory to explain the transmission of the disease.
23:33But nobody took him seriously.
23:35Why didn't Snow manage to persuade people of his theory?
23:40Everyone believed that diseases were spread through bad air.
23:43And it was so strongly believed.
23:45It was a bit like, I guess you can compare it to Darwin's theory of evolution.
23:48It was so radical, so ahead of its time, that people just struggled to see and believe that this was true.
23:59To prove his theory and convince people to take him seriously, the doctor turned into a mapmaker.
24:05When cholera broke out again here in Soho, Snow seized the opportunity to prove his theories once and for all.
24:18He walked around marking the deaths on a street map, house by house.
24:23And sure enough, a pattern quickly emerged.
24:26He realised that people who were drinking from the water pump on Broad Street were dying.
24:31Snow's map plotted the deadly progress of the epidemic.
24:36And the cluster of deaths around the water pump seemed to confirm his theory.
24:41He was so excited by this extraordinary breakthrough that he rushed into a meeting with the parish guardians
24:47and demanded that they immediately take the handle off the water pump
24:50to stop the local residents from killing themselves.
24:54The parish guardians weren't convinced by the vital connection revealed by Snow's map.
25:03But after the deaths of 600 people in the parish, they were prepared to try anything.
25:10The handle of the pump was removed.
25:15How do you think that Snow exploits the power of the map?
25:21It was definitely almost a PR technique of getting information, of getting a theory across.
25:27And we still use that very much today in terms of talking to policymakers, talking to people about what's going on.
25:34And showing them it visually on a map is a very nice way, a very friendly, perhaps unthreatening way of getting something that's quite scientific across.
25:46Thanks to John Snow's pioneering work, maps are now a powerful weapon in the battle against disease.
25:53So what kind of things are epidemiologists looking at today?
25:57It's very similar to the entire history of public health mapping.
26:02It's whatever is the biggest public concern at the time.
26:05So in Snow's time, cholera was the big issue.
26:08And now we're working on the things which are in the news of public interest.
26:12And there's lots of public health studies looking around climate change.
26:16One of them would be looking at malaria and how malaria may spread if the climate change is, as some predictions suggest,
26:22would it come back into Europe, for instance?
26:37As the industrial cities of Britain expanded, wealthy Victorians felt threatened by the ever-growing ranks of the poor.
26:47Maps became tools for understanding poverty as well as disease.
26:52How did the Victorians view poverty in this period?
26:59They viewed it, I suppose, as one of the most major problems of the time.
27:04The poverty question, what do we do with the masses of urban poor that had arrived and settled in the city during the previous decades of the century?
27:14That was seen as a major concern for people.
27:17The poverty question inspired a wealthy industrialist to create one of the most sophisticated mapping projects of the Victorian age.
27:29His name was Charles Booth.
27:32Booth was inspired to act when he heard the claim that 25% of Londoners were living in poverty.
27:39Booth was sceptical, but he was also curious.
27:46He decided to fund a team of researchers to do a thorough assessment of levels of poverty throughout the city.
27:52All the information would be carefully charted in a series of street maps.
27:57The project would continue for 17 years.
28:05Charles Booth was an unlikely man to try and map London's poverty.
28:08He'd made a vast fortune in animal skins on the docks of Liverpool.
28:12But the tanneries were terrified by his visits as he probed and catalogued every inch of his thriving empire.
28:20And it was a habit that would stay with him for the rest of his life.
28:25Booth's hunger for statistics was fed by a team of investigators.
28:31From hundreds of interviews and observations, his team created a series of colour-coded maps
28:37that showed the income levels and social classes of every street in London.
28:42This is one of Booth's maps and it shows Limehouse, one of the poorest districts in London at the time.
28:52Yellow on Booth's maps denoted wealthy areas, pink and red were the middle classes, blue and black were the poorest.
29:00And there's absolutely no yellow on this map whatsoever.
29:03Booth often joined his researchers as they spread out through the streets of London,
29:19gathering information on wages, working conditions and what Booth called social and moral influences.
29:26This wouldn't be just a map, it would be an intimate social profile of the city.
29:33Booth even lived with some of the families himself and he recorded his feelings in his notebooks.
29:39He wrote about those living just above the poverty line that
29:43the children have, when young, less chance of surviving than those of the rich.
29:47But I certainly think their lives are happier.
29:50They are more likely to suffer from spoiling than harshness
29:53for they are made much of being commonly the pride of their mother and the delight of their father's heart.
30:02One interesting aspect of Booth's work is that prior to Booth,
30:07poverty was seen very much as a morality problem.
30:10And one of the things that he showed was that poverty was not so much a problem of
30:17drunkenness or unwillingness to work, that was a very, very small part.
30:22He saw poverty as being a complex problem and needed to be therefore addressed
30:27through a whole variety of sources of information.
30:31Booth's researchers scoured these streets, making decisions about how they colour-coded the streets.
30:38The kind of information that they were feeding back into the maps
30:42were contained in these extraordinary notebooks where they wrote down every encounter in every single street.
30:49And they make for fascinating reading to discover not only who they were encountering and what they were seeing,
30:55but how that fed back into the maps.
30:58Here's one entry. It says,
30:59Rich Street, Jamaica Place and Gill Street are a nest of brothels frequented by common seamen of every nationality.
31:08Another, this is a noted thieves resort at Nightingale Lane.
31:12I knocked at the door of number 13 Jamaica Street.
31:15They were a man and a wife, and they kept an opium den.
31:21So what is it that Booth's maps reveal?
31:24Well, for me what's really interesting is that it reveals that poverty is spread out throughout the city.
31:30So you have pockets of poverty very, very close to areas of great prosperity.
31:36It's showing that even if you were living in the west end of London, for example, you weren't that far away from situations of severe poverty.
31:47Poverty is just specks of black and dark blue within a sea of much warmer colours, of relative prosperity.
31:57This is something that we can manage, that we can get to grips with, that we can handle.
32:06Booth's extraordinary project provided graphic evidence that helped prompt housing legislation to improve living conditions in Victorian Britain.
32:14It also fuelled a campaign to introduce an old age pension to alleviate poverty.
32:21Booth's maps reveal that more than a third of all Londoners were living in poverty.
32:26An awful statistic.
32:28But somehow by putting the problem on a map, Booth made it more manageable.
32:32It seemed less terrifying.
32:34And his maps also convinced Victorian society that something had to be done to help the poor.
32:56By the end of the 19th century, statistical maps were firmly established as powerful tools to tackle the social problems of the age.
33:07But maps, like statistics, could also be manipulated.
33:11In the 1890s, Jewish immigration was a source of growing tension in the East End of London.
33:19There was a housing shortage, and families were often crammed into damp, vermin-infested houses.
33:24Thousands of Jews were arriving here in the East End every year.
33:42Many of them were escaping really vicious persecution under the Russian Empire.
33:46But others were simply coming to make a better life for their families.
33:50But at a time of high unemployment in this area, the Jewish immigrants also created huge anxiety and quite a lot of anger.
33:57They were seen as a burden on the state, and also accused of taking local jobs.
34:02A group of liberal activists in the East End decided to do something to help.
34:11First, they wanted to make a map to establish the true size of the Jewish community.
34:18So they hired one of Charles Booth's researchers, the son of a London cabbie called George Arkell.
34:24Once again, he began knocking on doors all over the East End.
34:27George Arkell walked around these streets trying to describe each and every Jewish household.
34:36And this is the map that he produced.
34:38It's a very simple, colour-coded image that shows the exact percentage of Jews living in each and every street.
34:45Arkell's map was published in 1900 as part of a book called The Jew in London.
34:58It described the hard-working nature of the Jewish immigrants and argued against any attempt to stop further immigration.
35:04At the same time, the Conservative MP for the East End constituency of Stepney was campaigning against the Jews.
35:16He argued that they were bringing disease and crime to the city.
35:20And he compared them to grains of arsenic poisoning the British family.
35:24Arkell's map used bold, dark blue colour-coding to mark out those streets where over 95% of the population was Jewish.
35:36But by drawing attention to these streets, it gave the impression that the Jewish community was larger than it really was.
35:42And that wasn't the only problem with the map.
35:51Arkell has coloured the heavily Jewish areas in heavy dark blue and all the rest in red.
36:00As if to give the impression that all the rest was somehow an indigenous population.
36:06But it wasn't.
36:08Yes, sure, we had Jews here.
36:11We had Irish here.
36:13We had Protestants north of the railway lines.
36:17Just a little bit further out we had Italians.
36:20There was an important German community.
36:23So this was an extraordinarily rich cosmopolitan area then, as it is now.
36:29But you don't get that impression from this map.
36:32So it's really inaccurate to label this Jewish East London?
36:34Of course it's inaccurate.
36:37And I think you've honed in on a very important point.
36:40This isn't Jewish East London.
36:42Most of this area, what, two-thirds of it, three-quarters of it, is not Jewish at all.
36:50It's the Jews within East London.
36:53Sure, in a few streets there was heavy density of Jewish population.
36:57But over Arkell's East London as a whole, the Jews formed a minority.
37:05Arkell's map would have unintended consequences.
37:10The year after it was published, a fascist movement called the British Brothers League was set up in the East End.
37:15They seized on this map. It was quite often quoted in speeches by demagogues in the East End of London, speaking on behalf of the British Brothers League and so on.
37:28This is the proof that we have an alien community in our midst.
37:33One of them said, if you go down Whitechapel High Street, he said, this is Jerusalem.
37:39He actually used that phrase.
37:41And he drew attention to Jewish smells.
37:45He said the smells in Whitechapel High Street were not English smells, they were Jewish smells.
37:55Far from helping the Jews of the East End,
37:58Arkell's map unwittingly became a powerful weapon in the hands of their enemies.
38:03And within just five years, political pressure led to the passage of the 1905 Aliens Act.
38:08It was the first peacetime legislation to place limits and controls on immigration into this country.
38:27In the 20th century, statistical mapping was firmly established as a powerful tool of government.
38:32In 1940, these ordinary American citizens had no idea they were being watched.
38:42Over 4,000 miles away, someone was counting them and plotting them on a statistical map.
38:51This was the result. A map of America, seemingly rather innocuous, with neat little pie charts showing the percentage of European immigrants in each state and the countries down here that they came from.
39:07This is also a classified map. It says up here in the corner, for official eyes only.
39:11This was a map that was made by the Nazis.
39:16The map was part of a secret mission to flood America with Nazi propaganda.
39:22By 1940, Hitler had already invaded much of Europe. Britain was next on the list.
39:29The British were desperately trying to persuade the Americans to join the war against Nazi Germany.
39:37But President Roosevelt was reluctant to act.
39:39There is no demand for sending an American expeditionary force outside our own border.
39:50There is no intention by any member of your government to send such a force.
39:57You can therefore nail any talk about sending armies to Europe as deliberate untruth.
40:12The Nazis were determined to bolster Roosevelt's resolve to remain neutral.
40:17And they were leaving nothing to chance.
40:19Using statistics from the latest American census, they were drawing up a map that pinpointed the biggest communities of German immigrants living in the United States.
40:30The large red segments in these little pie charts identified the best targets for propaganda.
40:36The map revealed that the Nazis should focus their efforts in the rural communities of Missouri, Wisconsin, Nebraska and Texas.
40:50This was where public opinion could be most easily manipulated to oppose American intervention in Europe.
40:56In 1940, this dry statistical map was actually a weapon of war.
41:00Maps are incredibly powerful objects. They touch the mind, but they also touch the soul.
41:06They magically conjure up places that we've never even seen.
41:09And it's that power which leads them to being exploited or even perverted.
41:13The Nazis were masters of mass manipulation, but they weren't just using statistical maps as weapons of propaganda.
41:33In occupied Europe, they were also using them as tools of terror.
41:38This is a map of Slovakia from the Second World War, showing the population figures for the local towns and villages.
41:51But this is also a really sinister map, because the Z's marked here show Roman-Egyptian communities, and the black dots here, here, here, here and here, show the local Jewish population.
42:06The maps were drawn up in 1941 by a Nazi expert in ethnography.
42:21The Nazis passed them on to the president of the Slovakian puppet government, Josef Tissot.
42:25Under the Nazis, Tissot had already introduced anti-Semitic legislation to prevent Jews from holding public jobs, attending schools or owning property.
42:40Now he was under pressure to go further.
42:45For the Nazis, these maps were blueprints for subsequent policy.
42:48They allowed them, at a glance, to look at the dots and see where the Jewish communities lived in this area.
42:55And just a year later, in March 1942, they started rounding them up from the towns and villages here.
43:02The Slovakian Jews were sent to their deaths in the concentration camps.
43:06Within six months, 58,000 men, women and children had been taken.
43:20This neat statistical map of Slovakia was being used to drive the so-called final solution.
43:41In the hands of the Nazis, maps had become tools for genocide.
43:45After the Second World War,
44:14World War, revelations about Nazi atrocities, and the ideological tensions of the Cold War
44:19created a generation suspicious of government. The authority of maps also came under scrutiny.
44:29In May 1973, a German historian called Arno Peters confronted the map-making establishment.
44:37He denounced the most famous map of the world and said it was distorted by political and
44:41cultural prejudice.
44:46This is the map that generations of school kids have grown up with. It's the famous Mercator
44:50projection. But Peter shocked the world when he announced that this map was quite simply
44:55wrong. He pointed out that Mercator was distorting the size of countries in an attempt to retain
45:01their shape. As a result, Europe looks far more prominent, whereas the developing countries
45:06are being downplayed. If we look at Africa and Greenland, they look about the same size.
45:11But Africa is actually 14 times bigger. Peters condemned this map as being imperialist and
45:17racist.
45:21Peters was no cartographer, but he thought he had the solution.
45:24Taking account of the relative size of each country, he came up with a new formula for representing
45:34the globe on a map, and he called it the Peters projection.
45:39Peters claimed his map showed the true size of countries for the first time ever. He dramatically
45:46reduced the size of Europe, whilst expanding the size of Africa, elongating South America.
45:54And it's still something of a shock to look at this map and see how large these two continents
46:00loom on the Peters projection. Peters regarded himself as a champion of what he called the non-white peoples.
46:09And he saw this map as part of a wider project to right the wrongs that he saw as being perpetrated
46:15against those people living in the developing world.
46:33Anno Peters invited nearly 300 members of the international press to the unveiling of his new world map.
46:39The media embraced it with enthusiasm, but professional cartographers were furious at what they saw
46:44as the cheek of this outsider. They called the map deceptive, absurd, illogical.
46:50They were clearly really annoyed at what they saw as an untrained cartographer trying to map the world.
46:55And they accused Peters of making a map that was full of errors.
47:02The reaction was very disappointing for Anno Peters. It was in sharp contrast to the great enthusiasm of the international press.
47:16The map-making establishment saw it as a fundamental criticism of their profession.
47:23Peters was disappointed, even shocked. But he stayed optimistic and said,
47:31this map will prevail because it will succeed internationally.
47:41And the Peters projection did become an international mapping phenomenon.
47:45Anyone who wanted to display their liberal credentials pulled down their mercators
47:50and proudly replaced them with the Peters projection.
47:53It was championed by Oxfam, the United Nations and the Catholic Church.
47:58And it sold more than 80 million copies across the world.
48:04But the Peters projection did have distortions of its own.
48:07Despite all the success and adulation, the critics did have a point.
48:12The Peters projection was flawed. And it wasn't even accurate on its own terms.
48:17Peters had made some basic miscalculations, which meant that countries like Chad and Nigeria were twice their actual length.
48:25Did Peters ever accept that there were inaccuracies on the map?
48:29He was certainly prepared to accept mistakes.
48:38But no argument convinced him because everything had been calculated.
48:42Every point had even been recalculated to a specific formula developed by experts.
48:51He kept on checking and no mistakes were found.
49:00Arno Peters was attacking other maps for being biased.
49:03Yet he was blind to the fact that the Peters projection was just as distorted by his own political assumptions.
49:09But the Peters projection did do something quite extraordinary.
49:15It finally exploded the myth that maps can ever be 100% accurate, scientific, objective representations of the world.
49:22It showed that maps always have social and political agendas.
49:26Arno Peters not only transformed the way we look at the world.
49:40He also changed the way we look at maps.
49:43There is no such thing as a neutral map.
49:46And you're kidding yourself if you think you're a neutral cartographer.
49:49Since the 1970s, radical map makers have been building on Arno Peters' legacy.
49:55Deliberately using maps to promote alternative views of the world.
50:02If you think the Peters projection was strange, what about these maps?
50:06These images are so distorted that you can hardly tell that they represent the outlines of countries.
50:14They look more like peculiar pieces of abstract art.
50:18But they represent a very special kind of map.
50:21And it's a map with an urgent and very powerful political agenda.
50:28These images are part of the World Mapper Project, launched in 2005.
50:33They use statistics compiled by the United Nations to redraw the map of the world.
50:38These images draw attention to some of the greatest problems facing humanity in developing countries.
50:43This map shows HIV infection across the globe.
50:50Tragically, Africa dominates the entire map.
50:54India and Southeast Asia are also large.
50:58Europe reduced, very small, up there.
51:00This one shows refugee destinations, and the shape changes again.
51:07This time, places like Sri Lanka become massively distorted.
51:11As does South America, and rather interestingly, so does the Middle East.
51:16Here, teenage pregnancies.
51:19India now is the most dominant figure with the highest number of teenage pregnancies.
51:27In contrast to Japan, which is only a speck with the lowest rates.
51:32And finally, this map, infant mortality rates.
51:36Again, India and Southeast Asia loom large.
51:40But the map is once again dominated by Africa, with the largest number of babies dying under the age of one in the entire world.
51:53What was your aim in making these maps? What were you trying to do?
51:55I thought that now we had all this information about almost everybody in the world, it should be made much more widely available.
52:04And by available, I mean not just the numbers being available, but the actual picture of what it was showing being made available.
52:10So that people around the world could see what was being counted about them, what was known about their lives,
52:15and then you could decide for yourself what you felt about it and what you wanted to do about it.
52:18And that's the power of the map, isn't it? I mean, I'm fascinated by how you see that importance, that the map does something that text can't do.
52:27What is it that the map can give us?
52:30What does the map give us?
52:32The map taps into a whole part of our brain and our imaginations which text doesn't do.
52:37It's like looking at a face, looking at a picture.
52:40You first of all see the kind of eye line of the map, and it taps into different emotions.
52:44I mean, you can't take your ratio of numbers and become that concerned about it.
52:51But when you see a picture, it appears to be real. It's very different.
53:04These maps with their swollen and shrunken countries are a dramatic call to action.
53:08They take a mountain of statistics, which are usually so easy to ignore, and provide shocking clarity, a profound understanding of the most pressing problems that face our world today.
53:20The world mapper project captures the spirit of the digital age, globally aware, visually sophisticated, and technically innovative.
53:38And when it comes to navigating our way around the planet, today's photo-real online maps from companies like Microsoft and Google can take us anywhere in the world at the click of a mouse.
54:01From their corporate playground here in Zurich, Google Earth routinely sends out cars with mounted cameras to map our roads, cameras on tricycles to get into heritage sites, and aerial teams to capture the big picture.
54:21These images are combined with satellite photographs and then wrapped around a 3D model of the Earth to create an instantly accessible virtual world.
54:30It's the technology that only a few years ago would have been impossible outside of defense departments or, you know, the CIA.
54:40And now you have access to that information.
54:43And you can fly around the world with very high rates of frame update, i.e. it looks very smooth.
54:49And there's a massive amount of very clever technology going on behind the scenes.
54:54You know, you can explore as if you were flying over the Alps, you know, in a jet fighter from your home, and that's amazing.
55:01Google Earth has been downloaded by over half a billion people worldwide, and it's no surprise because there's something incredibly exhilarating about seeing our planet suspended there in space,
55:14hurtling down through the layers and coming to rest in your own street, which is what most people do when they usually log on to Google Earth.
55:23And this is Oxford. This is where I live. That's my own street, and that's where I get my coffee in the morning.
55:32This is a miniature version of the Earth at our fingertips. The world now seems open and accessible to all.
55:39Digital maps produced by online companies all over the world are helping to redefine the relationships between global corporations, national governments, and individual citizens.
55:51One of the things that surprised us was how quickly Google Earth became a tool for people, individuals, organizations to communicate their idea, whatever they had a concern over.
56:02In the Amazon, there was a tribe that we got to know who had, for many years, avoided civilization.
56:11So they didn't have a culture of writing reports or creating maps, but nevertheless, they were in an area that was under environmental pressure from logging and so on.
56:20But because they could recognize their local area from images, they were able to use Google Earth as a tool to delineate their tribal areas and then use that information then to fight their case.
56:37Maps have also been used to mobilize international public opinion.
56:42In places like Darfur, I mean, the mapping has taken on even more political resonance, isn't it?
56:47Yeah, so a few years ago when the atrocities were happening in Darfur, we worked with an organization in the United States to actually show people pictures of villages that had been burned.
57:00You could actually see the circles that were the people's huts that had been burned.
57:04And that had a huge human impact.
57:14For hundreds of years, maps have been used to do so much more than help us navigate around the globe.
57:19From the spiritual meditations of the medieval Catholic Church,
57:24to Victorian anxieties about immigration, poverty and disease,
57:29maps have been used to help us carve up, manipulate and make sense of the world.
57:36Digital maps are now being used in the same way.
57:39They feed our hunger for instant information
57:42and define our fears for the future of the world in the 21st century.
57:49Human beings have been making maps of one sort or another ever since we first walked the Earth.
57:54And what I've always loved about them is the fact that they define our world,
57:57rather than simply reflecting it.
58:00And they'll continue to shape who we are and what we do as humans, whatever our future.
58:08In the next program, maps inspire an age of discovery,
58:13the naming of America and an international treasure hunt.
58:17And maps continues here on BBC HD next Sunday at the slightly earlier time of 10 o'clock.
58:31Our new drama Five Daughters continues tomorrow at nine.
58:35And next night, it's Waterloo Road.
58:38.
58:39Outro Music
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